Pasture (and a Some Landscapes email feed)

Thanks for continuing to read this blog. Google's Blogger service has long since been overtaken by newer platforms (WordPress, Substack), but it would be hard to migrate to them, exporting all the stuff I have written. I find Blogger still serves my basic purpose, to provide ad-free, paid-subscription-free observations on landscape and culture that I can write quickly between a busy job and other commitments and projects. Unfortunately it has now been some years since Blogger provided an email feed feature to send new posts to anyone interested in getting them in their inbox. I've been told that the service they outsourced this to, Follow.It, is now full of spammy adverts and doesn't even have the content of the blog post - you have to click through to it. So, from today I am going to take matters into my own hands and create a list of subscribers so I can email them each new post when I publish it. Please feel free to unsubscribe from that annoying Follow.It service. 

If you want to be a subscriber, please email me at somelandscapes@gmail.com and I will add you to a blind carbon copy email list.

Līga Purmale, Pasture, 1980

Now I don't want this to be just a technical update, so I will also include a couple of attractive landscape paintings I saw in Riga last week. These are by Līga Purmale, who has a mere five line stub on Wikipedia, although you can read more about her on the exhibition website. She was born in 1948 and studied in the impressive-sounding Monumental Painting Workshop at the Teodors Zaļkalns Art Academy of the Latvian SSR. This institution is now just the Art Academy of Latvia, Zaļkalns name having been dropped as he was a big favourite in the USSR (awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour in 1971). Purmale and her partner Miervaldis Polis started their careers painting in a photo-realist style, using effects like colour solarisation. Her 'Misty Landscapes' period came in the eighties and Pasture, above, reminded me of contemporary works by Gerhard Richter. The 'untruthful' beauty Richter achieved was a means of questioning how to paint landscape in a post-Nazi, post-Romantic, post-religious West Germany. I wonder if there was anything similar going on here, in what was still the Latvian SSR. As the decade went on, Purmale's paintings got mistier and emptier. I particularly like the near abstract image of branches in a garden below. Eventually she moved away from this approach onto other things, painting fragments of urban space, images inspired by cinema and mass media and, more recently, compositions that draw on old photographs of her family in the early twentieth century.   

Līga Purmale, Garden in the Evening, 1989